A Day on the Farm

This is a true story about a single day in the life of a young boy...a day in which he learned of blind love, realized his mortality, found a connection between Santa Claus and budding sexuality, and witnessed the vicissitudes of a moral man.



Some days are more remarkable than others.

The sun rises and you go about breathing and learning, taking small steps, doing all the human things, and then the sun sets and you rest, readying yourself for what tomorrow will bring, or planning for what you will bring tomorrow.  Most days are like this; essential, but unremarkable when set against the vast backdrop of so many similar days, a long cadence of soft drum beats, a mirror of the heart.  Yet once in a while the drum beats loudly and you remember for the rest of your life.

A soft day in late spring slowly unfolds, a day still in the grip of the dawn's chill, but with a sun that presages the heat of summer.  I am just a boy.  Twelve years and four days old to be exact, and although I sometimes cannot recall details from that era, my birthday and the Saturday after are etched into my mind with total clarity.  My birthday was the one when Ralph Drivdall lined a home run through my mother's kitchen window, right in the midst of my birthday party, and right into the middle of my birthday cake.  It was a good shot.  Ralph was always bigger and stronger than the rest of us, and the crack of wood against ball echoed loudly off the slab sided barns.  Why we had oriented the playing field toward the house, instead of away from it, I'll never understand, but as soon as the ball was hit everyone knew that the house was in peril.  None of us could do calculus yet, but we all had an athlete's intuitive understanding of the inevitability of ballistics.  The ball did not disappoint.  The window between Ralph and the cake didn't alter the path of the ball very much, but it did contribute bits of itself to the mission.  The cake looked like something from a Grimm's Fairy Tale; a beautifully decorated butterscotch and spice concoction, my favorite, topped with a baseball incongruously sitting in the middle of a sugary lunarian crater, all surrounded by a picket fence of broken glass shards.  We were worried that my mother would make us eat it anyway.  I have a film of this in my head, and I suppose at this distant remove that I should remember what happened on its own merits, but mostly I remember that birthday because it was so close to what happened the following Saturday.

I was an odd boy, and as I often did I was sitting on the front porch in my grandmother's old wicker rocking chair, reading whatever I could get my hands on.  Once in a while I glanced up to check on the progress of the rising sun, just to be sure nothing was wrong, or to check on the progress of the barn swallows who were building their nests, again to make sure nothing was wrong.  The sun probably didn't need my help, but the swallows appreciated me for keeping our cats at bay.

And then it started.  I raised my eyes from my book just as a large car, a Buick I think, crested the hill crowned by my family's dairy farm.  It was towing one of those silvery house trailers, the kind made to look just like an old art deco toaster, and the load was probably a bit much even for so large a car because it's coming was slow, almost tentative.  It was nearly even with our driveway when I heard a loud popping noise, followed by the sound of steel grinding on pavement, and then a puff of blue smoke issued from underneath the trailer, which had tipped alarmingly, so much so that I could clearly see its roof.  I couldn't see the driver though, but whoever it was somehow maintained complete control and brought the car and trailer to a slow, almost dignified stop right in front of our house.  The car's occupants sat for a second, composing themselves I suppose, and then the driver's door slowly opened and a very old, very thin, and very white-haired woman emerged and started the long trek back to the trailer; long because her walk was that of someone wending their way through a forest of crystal, where any misstep could have disastrous consequences.

She stood for a minute, looking intently at the tire, perhaps hoping that by sheer force of imagination she could make this inconvenience go away.  But it did not.  The last remnants of escaping air announced that the tire was resolutely flat and required human intervention.  Then, reversing her earlier progress, the woman approached the passenger door, which like hers had slowly opened.  With some difficulty the man inside got out and stood leaning on the door.  They conversed for a moment; she talking and gesturing, he mostly listening.  I was about to go ask if they needed help when something made me wait.  When she spoke his face was slightly turned and raised, as though he were reading her words on the pages of a book held slightly above and to the left of her shoulder, a book seen only by him.  To a twelve year old when adults act in a slightly odd way it can be either intriguing or alarming.  After watching them for another minute I decided that they were just oddly interesting and to go offer my help.

As I walked toward their car the woman turned toward me and offered a greeting and a smile.  The man still stared in the direction of his invisible book, reading her words, and now apparently reading mine too.

"Would you like help with the tire?" I said, "I know how to change tires."

She replied, "Yes, Oh please.  My husband is blind and I don't think I'm up to it, but is there someone older around, maybe your father or a brother?"  When I explained that my father was in town and would be until dark, that I was the only boy of any age around for miles, and that I changed tires all the time on farm equipment, she agreed that I could help.  "But be careful," she said, "that trailer is very heavy."

Knowing now the reason for the old man's odd stare I found that I felt sorry for him and dedicated myself to the task of changing the tire as quickly as I could.  Somewhere I had heard that it is good to give freely of oneself, and taking this literally I already knew that I would refuse money if they were to offer it.  At this point I had yet to hear the man's voice as anything other than a murmur, and as the woman asked him where the spare tire and jack were stowed his responses did little to change that.  I started to think that maybe something was wrong with his voice as well.

Following her husband's directions the woman produced the jack and pointed out the location of the spare.  The jack was one of those hydraulic cylinders called a bottle jack, not much larger than a medium sized can, but able to lift very heavy loads.  As I carefully placed it under the frame of the trailer I heard the woman call to me, asking if she could use a bathroom in the house because she had just cleaned out the holding tanks.  I wasn't sure what the connection was between those two things, but I called one of my sisters from the house to act as her guide and went back to work.  It was my sister Karen who came to fetch the old woman; Karen, all of six years old, shoeless, shirtless, and wearing white and orange striped shorts.  As Karen walked down the sloping yard from the house the old woman reached into the trailer and pulled out a lightweight aluminum folding lawn chair, the kind you sit on at 4th of July picnics, and haltingly led her husband to it and sat him down.  I noticed that she had placed the chair facing the work zone, and that even if the old gentleman couldn't see, he could still appear to supervise operations.  My sister arrived at the road, and without a word, took the old woman's hand and lead her toward the house.

I jacked the trailer upward all the while looking underneath to make sure the end of the jack wasn't about to slip off of the frame.  People of this era were more inclined to trust individual skill, and less so fail-safe engineering, so there were none of those little jacking indentations that are common on cars and trailers now.  I was on my own, and as I worked the trailer higher the man finally spoke to me, not with the voice I had heard earlier, but with one strong and clear.

"Do you feel sorry for me boy?" he asked.

"No," I lied.  Two things occurred to me as I uttered that short word: one, that I had never been called 'boy' before without feeling it as an insult, and two, that I had never heard a Southern accent that wasn't part of some television program.  In truth I was not offended.  The word 'boy' rolled off his tongue without hint of condescension, with no intent other than to address, and the accent was like some exotic music I had never encountered before.  But I repeated my lie: "No."

"Good," he added, "Don't be.  I'm the luckiest man alive, you know that?  You think because I've got bad eyes that I'm miserable?  Do you boy?  Well I'm not.  All my life I wanted to buy a trailer and drive around this great country, seeing for myself what makes it tick.  But then my first wife up and died on me.  A good strong woman, you see, a little dull at times, but good, and strong.  She went to the grocery store and had a heart attack.  Somewhere in the canned vegetables section.  Keeled right over.  And then a little while later my eyes started to go.  Things just sort of started dimming out.  So I thought that that would be it for me, but then I met this woman, the one in your house right now.  I could still see well enough to know that she is the most beautiful woman who ever walked the Earth.  And as soon as she said two words I knew that she was the smartest too.  It was hard to believe that she seemed interested in me at all, but when I asked her to marry me, and she said yes, I just couldn't believe it.  I asked her what for, and what we would do.  She said that it was because she loved me, always had, and wanted to be the driver on my trip, that she'd describe what I couldn't see, be my eyes."

"Oh," I replied, "that's nice."

"Nice?" he said, "It's more than nice boy.  It's a miracle.  It's magic written in flesh.  Her eyes are so much better than mine ever were, you know that?  She has a gift.  She sees things and describes their beauty, or their horror, that too, in words that are better than the thing itself.  And you know what?  I've got the opposite gift.  I hear her words and make a picture from them that is so much better than it would be if I were seeing the thing for myself.  Do you know what that gift is called boy?"

"No."

"I don't either.  Maybe it's the first time it's ever happened.  But I know from what she's said that the earth here is green, the hills gently rolling, and that there are sweet lakes in every hollow.  Even blind I can see how beautiful it is, and I can smell it too.  I always thought New York was concrete and edgy people, but I was wrong, and if I was looking at all this through my old eyes, I bet I'd still be wrong.  So I'm the lucky one here boy.  I don't have eyes anymore, but I bet I see and know the beauty of this place better than you do.  If you ever know anyone who's eyes you can see through better than you can see through your own, well then you can be the luckiest man alive too, just like me."

I didn't know what to say.  I knew he had just spoken words of power to me, but I was too young to know what to do with them, so I grunted some acknowledgment and turned back to the work at hand.  I had only pumped the handle a few more times when the old man reminded me to place a block of some kind under the frame just in case the jack slipped.  I took an old cinder block we used to support the post of our mailbox, jacked the trailer up until the tire was suspended in air, and slipped the block under the trailer's frame.  After that, changing the tire was pretty straightforward.  At least it was until I got to the point of screwing the first nut back on a stud.  For some reason, probably damaged threads, it refused to be installed easily, and despite my best efforts, I could only manage to drop it and watch it roll back under the trailer.

Such things aren't important occurrences, normally, are they?  Dropping a nut shouldn't be one of the fulcrum events of a lifetime, the point upon which a lifeline teeters and things are labeled 'before' and 'after,' should it?

Cool gravel pressed sharply against my bare chest and belly as I flattened myself to the ground, thrust my right arm out under the trailer, and reached toward the nut.  I was close, but still a foot short of it.  Had I been a little older and more experienced, and had I not been imbued with a young boy's certainty of immortality, I might have done things differently, but I wasn't and I was, so I pushed my head under the frame, extended my arm full length, and grasped the nut.  I don't know if I pressed against the jack and dislodged it, or if it simply decided that it was time to let go, but with a sound that demanded my attention the frame of the trailer slipped off the tip of the jack and gravity began to exact its toll.

My first thought was of gratitude to the old man for his suggestion to place something under the frame in case the jack did what it had just done.  It was a short-lived thought.  I turned my head to face the cinder block and watched as the trailer frame came to rest on it, then, with the sound of bones breaking, the block gave way, splitting into two parts, neither of which was positioned well enough to hold the trailer up.

The trailer fell from its jacked height of eight inches to a resting height of maybe four inches.  The problem was that my head, even turned to the side, is roughly six inches thick.  It probably took a second to happen, and I don't know how I did it, but in that second I reactively moved back just far enough so that the frame of the trailer came down on my skull exactly at the point where it curves toward the crown.  The effect was that of toothpaste squeezed from a tube, or a wet cherry pit squeezed between thumb and forefinger.  No further effort on my part was required.  My head was simply squashed out from under the trailer.  I imagined a cartoonish popping sound, but that is probably the only place it was ever heard, in my imagination.

I must have made a fuss, maybe even letting loose a premature death-scream, but when it was all over I found that I was sitting beside the sagging trailer, pieces of cinder block strewn around, with bits of gravel pressed into my chest.  Blood was streaming down my face and thoughts of my narrow escape raced through my pummeled head.  I was crying, shaking.  It must have been a sight.  People came running from all directions: sisters, mother, neighbors, the old woman shaken loose from the house, even the blind old man found his way to me with surprising agility. 

It was Betty, at sixteen the oldest daughter from the farm across the street, who took charge, calmed everyone down, administered first aid, and assured my frantic mother that I would be fine, that it was just a little scrape and that scalp wounds always looked far worse than they really were.  Of course it was Betty who finished the tire changing job and looked after me, alternately comforting me and chiding me for being so dumb for not properly blocking up the trailer.  I listened to her - it helped.  It also helped that I was in awe of her.  I grew up with six sisters, a family next door with a single child, a girl, and Betty's family across the street, with five more girls.  Me and an even dozen girls on three farms miles from anywhere.  But it was Betty who was our leader.  Not only because she was older than the rest of us, but more importantly because she was strong, independent, intelligent, and in many ways a surrogate mother to us all.  When a cranky bull chased one of her younger sisters from the pasture adjoining their barn she thought nothing of pulling the family shotgun down, putting two blanks topped with rock salt in it, hopping on a tractor and charging that bull.  I watched that episode unfold in dumbfounded amazement.  The bull didn't learn to not chase people, but it sure learned that this particular shotgun-toting teen-aged girl on a tractor was a force to be reckoned with.

By the time Betty finished changing the tire and putting things right with me, and the elderly couple had lavished hugs and praise on us and gone on their way, it was nearly lunch time.  I'll never know if Betty had an ulterior motive or not, but she suggested that I might like to have lunch with Carla's family, explaining that Carla had wanted to come see what was happening and wanted to know if I was okay but that her mother had told her that she had chores to do first.

"Go have lunch with Carla," she said, "She likes you."

Thinking of Betty, shotgun in hand, charging me on the tractor, I obediently went, even though I had no idea what she meant by "she likes you."  Especially a "she likes you" delivered with an impish grin and twinkling eyes.

Carla was the only one of us who didn't have a sister.  My own sisters and I talked about this once, and wondered out loud what it would be like to grow up in a house shared with no siblings.  We wondered what it would be like to get all the Christmas presents.  Carla was two years older than I, flaxen haired, freckled and green eyed, lean and energetic, and like a younger version of Betty, strong, independent, and intelligent.  We were hiking and fishing buddies, often traipsing through the woods for hours, building secret little camps, casting shadows where none had been moments before.  We would sometimes double-up and ride Flick, her old mare, to the large pond a mile north and spend the afternoon swimming and talking of magical things.  I had never thought of her in any other way.  We had always worn the same uniform when we were younger; tattered sneakers and cut-off jeans but no shirt.  By the end of every summer we were brown as walnuts, and impervious to sunburn.  But then Carla became twelve and she started wearing shirts, always long sleeved, rolled up, and, winter or summer, made of a plaid flannel material.  I actively wondered why she had taken to this odd thing, the wearing of shirts, but then it just became part of who she was, part of the everyday background, and I stopped thinking about it.

Lunch with Carla was standard fare for where I lived.  Working a farm requires prodigious amounts of energy and you eat accordingly.  Lots of meat and potatoes, vegetables fresh from the garden, home baked bread, and raw milk from the coolers in the milk shed.   As many helpings as you want.  While we ate Carla and I made small talk with each other and her mother, again standard fare, but once or twice I found her looking at me in a way that was new to me.  Maybe, I thought, she's glad I didn't get seriously hurt, or maybe my bandages look funny.

As we were finishing her father drove in the driveway, returning home from the local dairy co-op, and asked if we would stack hay for him.  He had loaded the lower part of the loft by machine but all those bales had to be put up in an orderly fashion so more would fit later.  Carla's father was one of those taciturn men who for some reason always seem to end up running farms, and when he wanted you to do something for him he always prefaced what he said with "If ya want..."  I had been around him long enough to know that "If ya want" was not the beginning of a request.  "I want you to..." would have been more direct or "Right now you will..." more honest.  He only had to ask "If ya want..." once and Carla and I were on our way to the barn.

A worthy barn has a separate room where many and sundry things are kept, and where there is usually a workbench, complete with vise and anvil, and where welding equipment and other tools too heavy to carry about or too rarely used are stored.  Carla's barn was worthy.  It was a room we had played in many times before, especially when it was cold or raining, and was located at the base of the long ladder leading up to the hay loft.  Everything in this room was covered with a fine patina of dry dust, dust from the countless bales of hay stored high overhead, dust from the grain bins, dust kicked up by cattle as they ambled about.  It gave the room character and a feeling of timelessness, as though both the past and the future mingled with the now in comfortable slumber.  The room was awaiting.  Some find the numinous on mountain tops, or in cathedrals, or banks, but it can also be found in places like this room, perhaps better found and more strongly realized than anywhere else.

We walked in and shut the door and sat for a while, talking, hoping that somehow the hay would spontaneously stack itself and save us the work.  Sunlight streamed through glassless windows placed high on the outside wall, and motes of dust floated through the beams of light, sparkling like fireflies misplaced from a July night.  In a corner of the room opposite the door Carla's father kept a large air compressor.  Its purpose was to inflate the many tires a farm rolls on, but we had discovered other uses for it.  We didn't have an intellectual understanding that releasing a compressed gas cools it, that would come later, but we knew that when it was warm it felt good to squirt the air over ourselves, a feeling like one gets from the gusty breeze that predicts an approaching August thunder storm.  For years all of us children had played a kind of "King of the Hill" game, except here it was "Capture the Air Nozzle."  One of us would hold the hose and squirt the others who would in turn do their best to win the nozzle for themselves.  The game often devolved into a wrestling match, complete with gales of laughter and much childish mischief.  So it was on this day, at first.

At some point Carla and I stopped talking, stopped waiting for the hay to self-stack, and started playing out our old game, which, true to form, had become a contest to see who could best defend ownership of the nozzle.  But within a few minutes the hose and cooling air had been forgotten, and the game was simply to wrestle.  The wrestling was different though.  I knew it at the time, but didn't know exactly why.  There was a lingering of touch, a redolence in the air that was completely new, and a non-competitive playfulness to our game.  Carla looked different and she looked at me differently. Her eyes held a secret.  She abruptly stopped the game and breathlessly stood up and went to sit on the bottom rung of the hay loft's ladder.  I sat on the floor, expectantly, but not knowing quite what was happening.

"Hey," Carla said, "Do you know how to kiss?"

It wasn't a question I had been expecting.  I knew that an answer was required, and I was pretty sure that it had to be the right answer.  Sometimes a second is a very short period of time, but other times it stretches on forever.  The second it took me to respond to Carla was one of the forever kind.  My first thought was of my grandmother's leathery cheek where I had planted many kisses over the years.  Up until that moment that was really all a kiss had been about, a close up physical hello, or goodbye.  My next thought was about the day I had learned that although Santa Claus may have been a fantastically giving person, he wasn't real.

There had been a population explosion in my little town, and the school building would no longer hold all the children.  As a temporary solution, while a new building was planned, financed and constructed, the town rented space for second and third graders from the Elim Bible Institute, located high on a hill overlooking the town, a suitable vantage point for God's chosen ones.  Elim had been around for a very long time, and was in fact the seat of the college that would eventually move eastward and evolve into Syracuse University.  The classrooms were marked by huge old double-hung windows, multi-paned and unopenable since the turn of the century, and floored with creaky pine boards.  They were wonderful rooms for learning, but, because of oversight or expense, there were no facilities for eating.  Every day at noon the entire class walked the half-mile or so down the hill to the old school's cafeteria.  Rain, shine, snow - no matter, if you wanted to eat, you walked.  One day as I walked with my classmates I heard several of the boys guffawing and snorting from the rear of the line.  "Hey," one of them yelled up to me, "Sherry still believes in Santa Claus!  Isn't she just plain stupid?"  What, I thought, there's no Santa?  Up until that very moment I had believed in Santa Claus, and the look of indecision and shock must have registered strongly on my face.  Even though I managed a weak "Yeah, that's so dumb," Sherry's antagonists read me like a book.  Sherry and I walked together the rest of the way that day, stricken, and the boys in the back of the line had fun teasing us for weeks afterward.

There was no way I was going to repeat the Santa mistake this time.

"Sure," I said confidently, "of course."

"Okay, you want to go practice?" Carla said.

I suppose I was about to utter a profundity like "Umm" or something, but Carla was kind and simply grabbed my hand, pulled me off the floor, and then led me to the ladder and up into the birthplace of dust.

She sat on a bale in the dim loft, looked at me expectantly, and brushed the loose hay from her jeans.  When I took a seat on another bale several feet away she simply got up, walked to me, and sat on my bale, again brushing her hands over her jeans although there was nothing there to brush away this time.

"Well," she said, "what do you do?"  It suddenly occurred to me that she didn't know anything more about this thing, this kissing, than I did.

"What do you think you do?" I artfully dodged.

"Do you want to try what Betty told me?"  I had no idea what Betty had shared with Carla but, again, I wasn't going to admit total ignorance.

"Sure," I said.

Carla leaned toward me and waited.  I was pretty sure I was supposed to do the same and did.  Our faces inches apart, we waited, hesitant, perhaps sensing that the bridge we were about to cross was one-way, and that we would be different creatures once on the other side.  I didn't know why, but my heart was pounding in my chest and my breathing was labored, like I'd just run a race.  Hers was too, I noticed.

Carla stopped waiting first.

To say that when our lips met I felt a shock, a literal shock, would be an understatement, and from our later talks it was apparent Carla had experienced the same thing.  When I was older and in college I signed up for a course in human physiology, one that included several lectures on sexuality.  One day the professor droned on about how in human females - he always said that, human females, never the words 'woman' or 'women,' which I always found very odd - that there is a neurological connection from lips to nipples to genitals.  My head went up as I awaited the completion of his thought.  None came so I raised my hand and said "Human males too."  I owed that much to Carla.  I know that I quickly grew to like her idea that we should practice.  I liked it very much.  We practiced all that summer, in the hay loft, practiced and practiced and practiced until we got very good at it.  From that day forward Carla's father never had to ask us again to go stack hay.  I wonder if he thought we were just amazingly industrious kids or if he had an inkling.  Either way, he never said anything about his miraculously neat hay loft.  That day, that first day, after about an hour's practice, we broke from each other and in a mad rush stacked as many bales as we could before we had to go get our respective herds in for the afternoon milking.

When we parted we looked back at each other.  Yes, I knew, we had crossed a one-way bridge and we were different creatures.  That was okay with me though, and I knew it was with her too.  It would be just fine on this new side.

After the milking chores were done I ate supper with my sisters, all the while absorbed in what had happened that day.  They all seemed to think I was recovering from the trailer falling on my head and I did nothing to alter that notion.  After we finished eating, still lost in new thoughts and new feelings, I headed to my family's barn for my last chores of the day, yet even now the day had something in store for me.

As I rounded the corner of the barn leading up to the main door I saw a booted leg disappear into the gloom.  I knew my father was still away, and that my mother and sisters were in the house, so I approached slowly, wondering who it could be, who had come unannounced and simply walked into our barn.  When I was growing up things seemed safer than they seem to have become in later times.  I used to routinely hitchhike to school, nobody locked their homes or cars, and the worst thing that ever happened in our town, publicly at least, was when some high school kids broke into the liquor store and got rip-roaring drunk.  But still, I was cautious.  I entered the door and confronted the man, a stranger to me.

"Hello, can I help you?"

"Your daddy home son?" came the reply.

"Not for a couple of hours."

"Hmmm, well then, you don't mind if I have a little look around then, do you?"

I was sure this conversation was leading to bad things.  "Look around?  At what?"

"Here it is son.  Your daddy is late paying his land taxes.  I went to the courthouse today and paid them up.  Now if your daddy doesn't pay me then after a little while this barn, this whole farm becomes mine.  You see why I want to look around?"

This was too much for me.  The trailer fell on my head again.  I kissed Carla for the first time again.  And I heard this man's words again.  Floods of chemicals released suddenly in the body can produce unpredictable behaviors, and I couldn't have predicted mine.  I knew the man's words were true, but more importantly, I felt that they were.  But truth really didn't matter, only chemistry.  He was a big man, probably 250 pounds, and strong as an ox.  Regardless, I launched myself at him headfirst, fists windmilling to no affect, yelling.  He stood there, in the doorway, and just let me hit him.  He didn't even put up his arms in self-defense.  At some point, after the chemicals coursing through my body had diminished, I stopped, unable even to raise my arms.  I wondered when he was going to raise his hand and break my neck with a mere flick of his little finger.  I wondered if it would be one of my sisters who would come upon my broken body, or Carla.  I tried attacking again.

"Whoa, whoa there.  Hold on now.  Let me talk."  He reached under my arms, picked me up as though I weighed nothing, and deposited me on a shelf over the boot rack, and stood back.  I sat there crying.  He waited for a while.

Then, "Are you okay now?  No more kamikaze tactics?"  I didn't know what a kamikaze was but simply nodded my acquiescence.

"What happened to your head?" he asked.  I told him.

"Hmmm, next time use a block of oak or maple.  Stand it on end, the grain running up and down.  Won't break up like a cinder block, okay?"  I nodded again.

"Listen son, I got off on the wrong foot with you.  I'm not a bad man, and I'm sorry I spoke to you like I sometimes have to speak to the people who owe taxes.  No matter what, it's not your fault that the taxes on this place haven't been paid."

"We're nothing without this farm," I said.  It sounded old, coming from my lips, like a script written for someone else, but he was listening, and then he smiled.

"I understand son," he spoke softly, "and it almost never happens that people lose their property.  I pay a lot of back taxes, for many of your neighbors in fact.  I do it because I don't want people who have a bad year, or make a bad decision, to lose what they've taken a lifetime to build up.  And I do it because I can.  If I don't pay them somebody else will, and they may want to take the land straight away, no mater the pain they cause.  I don't know if your daddy had a bad harvest, or lots of vet bills, or had to buy a new tractor unexpectedly, or is just plain dumb, but what I do know is that the county says he owes money, so I paid it.  I'll come back another day and talk with your father directly, and we'll see if we can work things out.  You love this land, don't you?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Then don't worry, I'll make sure your father and I work things out."  I noticed that he had switched from 'daddy' to 'father' in his talk.

"Thank you," I said.

"You going to be all right son?  You look like you've been through the mill today."

"Yeah," I said, "I'm going to be fine."  And I was.

I never saw that man again, but years later discovered that he was a member of an old-money family who had purchased a vast tract of upstate New York in the 1700's.  At one time their holdings measured in the millions of acres and stretched from Lake Ontario on the north to Pennsylvania on the south.  I always assumed that he eventually spoke to my father, but I'm not absolutely sure.  I do know that he helped me with my chores that evening, not leaving until they were done, and that we never lost the farm.  One of my sisters lives on it now, a loamy heirloom passed down to one more generation.

I was back in my house by dark and never mentioned the man in the barn to anyone.  Feigning tiredness from a long day I begged off chocolate cake and television with my sisters and slid up the stairs to bed.  I lay there, awake, long after everyone else had surrendered to the sandman.  I'd only been conscious for a few years, and was pretty sure I'd just had a remarkable day, one not likely to be repeated anytime soon.  In the space of a dozen hours I had almost been crushed, found out that there was a lot more to kissing than my grandmother's dry and leathery cheek, and fended off, maybe even made a friend of, a man who my family was literally indebted to.  When sleep finally did come, it was total, and lasted well into the next day.  When I finally awoke I felt different, somehow a little less a boy, and a little more of a man.  The process still continues, and indeed in some ways has wrapped back on itself. 

The boy who experienced this special day is still with me, and once in a while he looks outside, smiles, says hello and waves.